


in the pines

by schmerzerling



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Angst, Logger Dean, M/M, Powerful Men Give Dean A Boner, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25690069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmerzerling/pseuds/schmerzerling
Summary: The Clatsop State Forest is a magnificent and ethereal miracle of nature, and despite being partly responsible for its destruction, Dean's more than a little in love with it.Little does Dean know, the feeling is mutual.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 19
Kudos: 248





	in the pines

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all, not super involved in the SPN fandom at the moment, but I found this fic going through my google drive today, and I honestly like it a whole lot and think it's a shame it's never been posted. It was originally written for the SPN tarot anthology, and I wasn't meant to post it elsewhere, but I think the statute of limitations has officially run out and I feel no remorse.
> 
> Title comes from [this song](https://youtu.be/PsfcUZBMSSg), which is REAL fuckin' eerie and should set the tone well.
> 
> Enjoy!

The hotel rises from the mist like a mirage when the pain in his arm starts making it tough to focus. He doesn’t pay to stay—he rooted around his pockets for his wallet when confronted with a listless attendant. Somehow, when he came up with nothing, he got a room key to show for it. Dad always taught him that anything that feels too easy is suspicious, and this does, but at the same time, he’s too bone-deep tired to care. He doesn’t want to go back home tonight because home sucks. Dad’s drunk. Sam’s insufferable right now. And he doesn’t want to head to the hospital in Portland. Because. Jesus. So—this is it.

The hotel’s a stone’s throw from the Clatsop State Forest, closer than he thought hotels could get, and it’s the kind of dirty you only get situated a half hour’s drive from the Oregon coast. Dirty like a prehistoric forest is dirty—alive, like the green of the earth has risen up to claim it. He could tell, standing on the threshold of his room, that the walls inside would be creeping with mold, and he’s not disappointed when he dislodges a door that’s warped with the air’s wet chill to find it mouldering and damp.

They didn’t know what to do with him at basecamp, because _Winchester is never the problem_. Winchester knows how to _feel_ the earth better than anyone on his squad, but somehow, Winchester almost dropped a tree on himself today. They gave him pain pills as the med airlift disappeared behind the heaving rise of another wood-capped hill. Then they made him someone else’s problem.

Hurt slices through the veil of painkillers, but he tolerates it because he deserves it. His right arm is strapped tight to his chest and his whole body pounds crisp bursts of pain to all his extremities with every heartbeat. He wriggles his toes into the disgusting carpet and slaps decisively outside again, barefoot this time, for a smoke.

It’s still raining, the sky dark and overcast and heavy. Early summer, and Dean hasn’t seen the sun in weeks. There’s an overhang out front that faces an empty parking lot, and he stands at the edge of it as water splashes onto his toes from the pounding of the rain on the pavement. He can barely feel it. He can see a fenced-off relic of a pool in the parking lot, an old thing that clearly hasn’t been full of anything but murky rainwater in who knows how long.

He realizes pretty quick that he’s gonna have a hard time lighting a cigarette one-armed in this storm. When he peers over his shoulder, all the windows aside from his are dark and still. No help in sight, he sighs, indulging in a little harmless brooding. The heavy rain pulses like static in his ears. His eyes focus blankly on the middle distance as trucks rumble by, sending up gushing waves from the cavernous potholes of the old mountain road. When he listens hard, he can hear the familiar sounds of buzzing chainsaws, creaking trees, muffled shouts. When he closes his eyes, he can feel the boom of felled timber in his bones.

When he’s rebooted his senses, he notices he’s not alone. There’s a man, and Dean didn’t hear him approach at all, but he manages not to jump a mile. Dean appraises this steady new presence, wary. He looks familiar, in a way. He’s tall, and built, and handsome. Completely rain-saturated, too—not that he seems to mind, if the bare feet and transparent white shirt are any indication.

“You a planter?” Dean asks, eyeing the open white button-down, the linen pants. “You got that look about you.” Dean doesn’t say, _you look like a pot-smoking, tree-hugging hippie who’s happy to make eleven cents per tree ‘cause of your dumb principles_ , but he might as well have.

Dude’s expression is pleasantly neutral, though. Dreamy. When Dean looks close, he sees sprigs of vivid purple hyacinth resting behind his ears and peeking in endearing tufts from the heavy tousle of his dark hair. He doesn’t say anything for a moment, appraising Dean right back. Then, his placid smile breaks out wider, gummier. 

“I suppose you could say that.” His voice is deep and rumbly and earthy, so much so that the force of the words feels like roots pulling from the ground under his feet. 

Dean quirks a smile. “Don’t guess you like me much, then.”

The gummy smile breaks, and he looks so genuinely hurt by that, Dean feels like he’s hit the guy.

“No, of course not,” he says, eyes two sad little puddles. “Why would you say that?”

“I mean—” Dean paws at the back of his neck, ducks his head. Gestures his plaid shirt. “I’m a logger. We’re like, the planter’s natural enemy.” He huffs a breath, remembering. “One time I had to cross a planter picket to get to work, and some chick in a tie-dye t-shirt hucked a rock at me.” He mimes a rock bashing the side of his head. “She got in a good hit, I was bleedin’ all over, and she looked so _surprised_.” He chuckles. The guy just looks stricken again.

“That’s awful.”

Dean shrugs. 

“Probly the least I got coming.”

“No, no,” he lays a wet hand on Dean’s shoulder, cuts a print into his rain-spotted overshirt. “No. The forest needs people like you, too.”

“The forest needs assholes to mow it down for the sake of their brother’s tuition?” 

Just saying the word _tuition_ out loud stings, salt in a wound too fresh. 

“It needs balance.”

“Balance. Right. Just a _dash_ more wanton destruction.”

“You’ve never taken more than you have to. You respect this forest.”

He does. He’s in awe of it, and every cut he makes to a hundred-year-old douglas fir makes him feel like an even shitter person. Which is really saying something. 

But destroying is all he’s good at.

“Ooookay,” he drawls. “I don’t suppose you feel like lighting a smoke for me?”

He tugs a lighter from his pocket, and Mr. Hippie Dippie recoils, like he’s been burned by the very sight of a cheap bic from the truckstop down the road.

“No.”

Dean rolls his eyes. He puts the lighter back in his pocket, and the guy continues to not leave, not say anything, and drip water in steady spatters on the cement. More disconcertingly, he continues to give Dean the full brunt of his expectant stare, which is just as intense as his voice. 

“You got a room in this joint?” Dean mumbles, filling the space between them.

“No,” he says.“I walked here.”

Dean startles. “What? Dude, we’re in the middle of fuckin’ Clatsop. It’s all forest.” He swallows, dry going down his throat. “You’re not wearing shoes.”

The guy meanders out into the rainy parking lot. Dean could swear he sees soft pockets of springy moss flowering up to cushion the falls of his feet through the black asphalt, but that might just be the painkillers.

“I know my way around very well. I’ve lived here for quite some time.”

“Yeah but—walkin’ around a forest where people are logging is—” He can’t stop where his brain takes him, to the snap of the tree falling in the wrong direction, the sudden gust of wind down the side of the mountain. The screams and the chaos. Breathlessly, like it’s been punched out of him, he continues, “Really, really goddamn dangerous. If they don’t know to watch out for you—”

Guy just smiles, eyes wide open to the rain. There’s clearly not a lick of self-preservation in him.

“Jesus—” Dean grabs him by the arm, cool and firm and slippery like a felled tree. “Jesus.”

He says, “No. I’m Castiel,” as Dean drags him to his room.

“And I’m the Queen of fuckin’ England,” Dean mutters, hoping this podunk shithole at least has some decent towels. He sets Castiel very deliberately on the wooden dining chair by the front window. 

He says, “I’m gonna get you dried off, you idiot,” and disappears into the bathroom. The towels suck, but there’s enough of them. When he comes out, Castiel is removing his shirt, revealing the lines of his back, firm and smooth and evenly tanned like the shirt was more the exception than the rule. Dean shouldn’t be shy, shouldn’t want to bury his face in mildewy towels to hide his blush. He’s used to aggressively not looking at dudes’ junk up at basecamp, because his dad didn’t raise an idiot. Benny always said—

He stops dead on an inhale, caught between breaths, and while the bubble of air sits frozen in his chest, he hears a rustling from across the room, and looks up to see Castiel luxuriating in the comforter on his bed. There’s a visible trail of hyacinth everywhere he’s been in the room, so Dean can see the path he took through the kitchenette, past the gaudy pine tree room divider.

“I gotta sleep there later, y’know,” Dean says weakly.

“You’re Dean,” he says, unprompted, sitting up, eyes alight.

Dean blinks. “Huh?”

“You’re _not_ the Queen of England,” he says earnestly. “You’re Dean.”

“How’d you—?” Dean crosses the room and sits next to him on the bed. He sets down the towels and picks out one to, with only a second’s hesitation, rub along Castiel’s neck, down his shoulders. This close, Dean can smell him. Dean’s spent six years traipsing around Clatsop, and he knows by now how it smells. The dark decay of the forest floor. The fresh greenery of new life in the canopy. If Dean leaned in close, buried his face in Castiel’s neck, he knows that he’d smell the both of them, working in tandem. 

“I’ve been watching you for a long time.” Dean barely slows, dragging the towel through Castiel’s hair, over his face. When his eyes surface, Castiel says, “Since you faked your ID when you were sixteen to work.”

The caress along Dean’s cheek feels like a cool mountain stream, and the soft kiss on his lips _tastes_ like one. It tastes familiar. Not particularly strange. Like every single time he’s ever taken off his hard hat and dipped his face in the creek at the height of noon heat. 

He thinks maybe he’s been in love with that kiss a long time.

“The fuck—” He pulls back once he fully realizes what’s happening, skitters backwards uncoordinatedly. While Dean is still trying to get his wits about him, Castiel pulls something familiar from the pocket of his pants.

“You dropped this.”

“Uhhh,” Dean trails uselessly, looking him right in the eye while he snatches it. Sure enough, it’s Dean’s wallet. His license, his cards. There’s still cash in the pocket. The only difference is it looks—aged. Mossy. Like the hotel looks aged. Like it’s been sitting on the forest floor for months, when he couldn’t have dropped it more than eight hours ago. “Dude, this is getting—”

“I had to come see you,” Castiel says urgently, letting the comforter drop to reveal his bare chest, scooting eagerly forward. “Gabriel told me not to, but I had to make sure you were okay.”

Instinctually, Dean mutters, “I’m fine.” Like an automated response. Away from office. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. 

“You didn’t listen to what I was telling you.” Castiel rests a hand atop Dean’s ribcage. “You always do.” 

Dean blinks.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do.”

He does.

“You knew the tree would fall on you, but you cut it clean through anyway. I tried to tell you, and you didn’t listen. You usually listen. You usually—you usually listen.”

“I—no. The tree fell on—” Panic rises in his throat, and he swallows hard. “It just winged me on the way down.” He shrugs his wrapped shoulder. “It _fell_ on _Benny_.” It’s not an easy thing to say, because the sight of it is still fresh in his mind. The sound. The wet _crack_ of two tons of lumber coming down on human legs.

Castiel straightens up, stands, backlit by the dark green of the forest in the window behind him. Dean gets a better sense of the breadth of his shoulders, the size of him, standing there, and Dean is—scared. For the first time since he met him. He seems—expansive. Like the moment you realize you’ve lost your way in the woods, and you have to look helplessly to the identical infinite avenues of darkly canopied forest stretching in every direction around you.

Castiel gets in very close again, as Dean wrings the wet towel in his nervous hands. There’s a floral smell on Castiel’s breath, when they’re breathing the same air.

Castiel says, with all the force of a gust of wind barrelling down the side of a mountain, “That’s because I _pushed_ it.”

And then he kisses Dean again, possessive this time, and every part of Dean that isn’t shriveled in terror is on fire because _holy shit_. It’s not a calm mountain stream this time—Dean can feel the rapids in it. The choppy waters on the way to a fall.

When Dean pulls back, he starts to notice a change coming over the room. The carpet under his feet has turned lush and green and soft. There’s moss creeping up the walls, up the front of the old cathode TV, in delicate spirals up the antenna. 

Dean mutters, “Benny’s my friend.”

“He’s not more important than you.”

He stops. Thinks. He wants to say a million things. I’m dangerous. I’m drowning. All I can do is tear things down. After a quiet moment of gazing beyond the window, into the trees, Dean says, “You’re beautiful.”

And Castiel softens. 

“I’m sorry about your friend. But I couldn’t let anything happen to you, Dean. I won’t.”

Dean huffs out an exhale that he can see in the rising damp of a room that’s dilapidating before his eyes. Wallpaper curling down, chairs breaking into their components, a mighty tree root splitting the floor clean through. And in the final moments, when the cold has saturated the room completely, and the lighting fixtures have sizzled out with a new onslaught of rain, Castiel, one with the greenery of the room around him, whispers icily, “Don’t do it again.”

And then Dean’s in the front seat of the Impala, sporting one hell of a confused boner. His wallet’s in his pocket. The car’s idling on a one-way logging road. There’s an empty lot next to him, and the only thing that makes him believe he’s maybe not completely crazy is the ancient remains of a blue pool, a tree sprouting tall from the drain at the bottom. 

After he’s gotten his bearings, he sets his sights on the Clatskanie Clinic and shifts into gear. And when he reaches down to turn the radio on, he notices the delicate, apologetic petals of a purple hyacinth tucked into the slats of his heating vent.


End file.
